


More Indelible Than Ink

by softplacetonest (aurorasparrowmist)



Category: NCT (Band)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Royalty, Asexual Character, Atypical Displays of Affection, Courtesan Lee Donghyuck, Established Relationship, Fluff, Ink, Light Angst, Long-Distance Relationship, Palace Scribe Huang Ren Jun, Poet Mark Lee, Royalty AU but No One is Actually Royalty, clandestine meetings, mark lee is present in words if not in action, the bed gets messy in a not sexy way
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2021-03-08
Updated: 2021-03-08
Packaged: 2021-03-18 10:07:34
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,735
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/29607810
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/aurorasparrowmist/pseuds/softplacetonest
Summary: “You could never mar me,” Donghyuck rasps. “Transform me, Renjun.”
Relationships: Huang Ren Jun/Lee Donghyuck | Haechan/Mark Lee
Comments: 11
Kudos: 51
Collections: Challenge #5 — I heard a secret..





	More Indelible Than Ink

Donghyuck splays himself out on silken sheets as Renjun carefully balances ink bottles and writing brushes on the unsteady mattress. The open window brings in a soft summer breeze that raises chills on Donghyuck’s bare skin. He tries not to shiver, but a small vibration moves through the bed that shakes Renjun’s meticulously placed setup. 

“Stay still,” Renjun scolds. He palms a hand down Donghyuck’s chest to soothe his tremors, and Donghyuck shallows his breath to accommodate the pressure. 

Renjun is seated back on his haunches, dressed in a sombre blue-grey tunic appropriate for mid-rank palace scribes. The colour matches the limestone of the palace walls, allowing him to slip into the background of meetings and rulings, only phasing into visibility when the king calls for him. 

Donghyuck is no king, and he is glad for it because he would bring Renjun forth at any opportunity just for the privilege of seeing his face and know that he is being seen in return. Here, under the canopy of this bed, Donghyuck hoards the angles of Huang Renjun like a childhood song scraped from memory. 

The air stills, holding its breath for Renjun’s instruction, and Donghyuck turns into the palm cradling his cheek and exhales a stream of air against Renjun’s cool inner wrist. 

Donghyuck feels himself fracture under Renjun’s long silent gaze. The sheets are beginning to winter in anticipation. Renjun moves his leg over Donghyuck’s body to settle himself on the meat of his thighs. He lets Renjun adjust his weight and doesn’t allow himself to flinch, even when a passing wrong movement sends nerves ricocheting up his spine. Renjun told him to be still. Renjun told him he wants a canvas, and Donghyuck is well-practiced at being a useless pretty thing.

Renjun looks over his brushes before selecting one made of sable hair with a well-worn groove in the bamboo handle. Donghyuck had watched him make this particular instrument in his novitiate years. There were many nights where Renjun dug his way through scrolls to research the best techniques, and many more nights were spent carefully binding and treating individual hairs until it resembled a facsimile of a proper artist’s brush. In the years following Renjun’s graduation into a proper scribe of the court, he has acquired and received several finer brushes, but this amateur’s fumbling remains a sentimental favourite. 

Renjun gathers water from a ceramic bowl with his fingers and sprinkles it onto the inkstone by Donghyuck’s shoulder. The excess water sluices into the reservoir and Renjun picks up a freshly carved inkstick with plum blossoms imprinted on the front—a gift Mark brought back from his travels. He presses the stick onto the wet stone and grinds it in careful circles to dislodge the soot and gradually adds more water to mix the ink. 

The brush dips into the reservoir of the inkstone and gently runs along the flat grinding surface to rid itself of excess fluid. It lowers towards Donghyuck’s chest before hesitating a mere sliver above his skin. Donghyuck holds his breath, refusing to let himself initiate the first contact between himself and Renjun’s brush, and waits. 

“What’s wrong?” Donghyuck asks. 

Renjun rolls his tongue between his teeth before meeting Donghyuck’s eyes. “I don’t know what to write.”

“Did you forget the words?” Donghyuck’s eyes drift over to the creased letter sitting on the bedside table. “I can remind you.”

“No,” Renjun whispers. “I couldn’t forget.”

Donghyuck matches Renjun’s sotto voice. “Then what is it?”

A pause. A breath. An eternity before Renjun speaks. “How could I write on something so beautiful?”

Renjun’s gaze holds Donghyuck’s throat like a vice. Renjun is rarely expressive of his personal feelings—that realm stays firmly in Donghyuck’s voice and in Mark’s pen—preferring to let other people’s words fill space on the page. He is a conduit of administrative intention, holding himself open just enough for the necessary message to pass through him and spill out his fingertips. Renjun’s heart does not exist on the page, not in words. It creeps out in soft silences, in the ink-stained fingerprints left behind on drawn curtains, in featherlight pressure under a proffered jaw.

Once, Donghyuck visited Mark’s rooms to find Renjun sitting much too close to the fireplace. Mark had been sitting at the desk, refusing to glance in Renjun’s direction as he fed scraps of parchment to the flames.

“Why?” Donghyuck had asked.

“It’s too dangerous,” Mark had replied, voice shaking with grief.

Each piece of parchment held a sliver of a sprawling landscape long lost to history and subjugation. It felt like home. It felt like impermanence. Donghyuck spent the rest of that evening helping Renjun burn each piece until all that was left was ash.

Here, in this bed, with Renjun poised above him and his words ringing in his ears, Donghyuck feels carved out. A touch of Renjun’s brush now would crumble his chest like a landmine. 

Donghyuck reaches over and presses his thumb into Renjun’s hip as a salve for his nerves. “You could never mar me,” he rasps. “Transform me, Renjun.”

He can’t look away from Renjun, so Donghyuck only gets a half-flash warning to hold his breath before the cool shock of ink meets his chest. The soft brush hews down his sternum, etching in lines that they had spent countless hushed evenings pouring over. Mark’s letters are a treasure, divulging secrets to a captive audience of two. If the court caught wind of their correspondence, it would be ruin for them all. Lee Minhyung’s lyric is coveted, his presence demanded at every higher lord’s hall and at the king’s own table. The idea that two ordinary men might be in private reception of his poetry? Unthinkable. 

Renjun’s eyebrows furrow in concentration as he mouths out the words he writes. 

_ I wake every morning already reaching for your absent hand _ hooks itself into the bars of Donghyuck’s ribs. 

_ Be my moonlight, my sunshine _ finds purchase behind his knee.

_ Come to me in my dreams so I can feel you again _ winds into the curve of his abdomen.

Slowly, painstakingly, Renjun cuts Donghyuck anew. He overwrites the sins that Donghyuck feels clinging to his skin until every memory of foreign skin is replaced with Renjun’s brush and Mark’s words.

Donghyuck’s eyes flash open as Renjun grasps his chin and tilts it downward. He feels the swirl of a fine detailing brush sweep under his eyes and up his cheekbone towards his hairline. 

“What are you doing?”

Renjun hums in distraction, electing not to respond. He twirls the brush to thin out the edge and run hairline fractures across Donghyuck’s temple and along his jawline. Fingers tug Donghyuck’s skin taut and he can feel Renjun draw small patterns onto his skin. 

“I’ll have to wash this off before we leave the room,” Donghyuck says through unmoving lips. 

“I know,” Renjun murmurs. He fans out his brush and draws a thick line obliquely down Donghyuck’s lips. “It’s okay.”

If he could, if he was allowed to be marked by unpaid hands, Donghyuck would wish for Renjun’s hands to ruin him. He would lay on this bed, prone as he is now, as Renjun runs bloodlines along the meat of his muscle. He would lay still as marble as Mark whispered verses into Renjun’s ear, as Renjun carved epigraphs into his skin.

Mark would take his hand, magnanimous as a deity, and bid him back to life. “Galatea,” he would whisper. “You are a wonder.”

If only Donghyuck was allowed constancy.

“Don’t,” Renjun says.

“But—”

“You survived, Donghyuck.” Renjun wets his brush with ink and fans it across the base of his neck. “You are not your own judge.”

“I could do better.”

“So could I, if I were brave enough.”

Donghyuck drags in a ragged breath, unable to stop his diaphragm from twitching under Renjun’s palm. The weight above him expounds as Renjun presses forward to centre his hand on Donghyuck’s sternum. Breath comes easier with pressure.

The cathedral bells ring. They have half an hour before they are called away to their duties.

“Would you like to see?” Renjun asks.

Donghyuck takes the offered mirror and holds it above himself. Below his shoulders, Mark’s lyric unwinds across his skin like a scroll. The lines from Mark’s most recent letter are there, as are verses recalled from previous missives and from whispered confessions in the shadows. Some lines are written twice, one in reverse, so Donghyuck can read them rightways in his reflection. 

Above his shoulders lies a masterpiece. A sun rises on the horizon of his clavicle, hazy as a heatwave. Skeletal trees and wild flora reach skyward towards his hair as gulls and raptors take flight across his mouth and nose bridge. Donghyuck’s chest aches—it feels like home. It feels like loss.

Donghyuck surges upwards, heedless of the water and inkstone. He grasps Renjun’s jaw and brings him close until he can feel Renjun’s breath on his painted lips. He wants to kiss Renjun breathless, wants to feel his cool skin and bury himself so deep until they are indistinguishable, but he is loathed to smear Renjun’s work—it will be washed away soon enough.

“Please,” Donghyuck begs. The echoes of the cathedral bells tremble in his ear.

Renjun curves a sad smile and lifts a sullied washcloth to Donghyuck’s face. He wipes it across inked skin and closed eyes until Donghyuck’s face is bare once again. 

“I’ll take care of the sheets,” Renjun says. Donghyuck can feel ink dripping along the back of his thighs.

“Please,” Donghyuck begs.

Later that evening, Lee Minghyung returns to court. He regales the gathered nobility with songs of his travels and stories of far off lands. Donghyuck, draped across the king’s lap, is asked to sing. He rises to his perch, pretty as a songbird in his golden threads and painted silks, and sings a lyric that Minghyung composed as a tribute to their returning bard. The dried ink on his body crumbles as his linen chemise rubs against his skin. From the corner of his eye, Donghyuck can see Renjun leaning against the stone wall, mantled in shadows. He blends in, blue-grey, and takes note of every brush of cloth and every whisper. Renjun’s mind is a steel trap, and perhaps if Donghyuck and Mark do their jobs well enough, there might still be some hope for them left.

  
  


**Author's Note:**

> All lines of poetry are lines directly taken or paraphrased from Mark's verses. Songs include: Baby Don't Like It, Angel, and Dream Me.
> 
> [twt](https://mobile.twitter.com/aurasparrowmist) | [cc](https://curiouscat.me/aurasparrowmist)


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